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Review of ‘Learning Dojo’ book

I was recently requested by the publishers of the book ‘Learning Dojo‘ by Dojo community regular Peter Svensson. They very kindly provided a copy of the book, and after reading it, here follows the review that I posted on Amazon.co.uk.

This books should suit those who are either just starting out using Dojo, or those who are thinking of picking it up and want a good overview of what Dojo offers.

It spends quite some time explaining how the Dojo community works, why it is organised like it is etc. Experienced users of Dojo can of course just skip these pages, but it seemed a little unnecessary for people who just want to know how to get something done.

There were a number of English language errors, , which are forgivable, however there are also a number of badly formatted code examples in the earlier chapters which are hard to read.

As the book goes on it gets better, with some very good and comprehensive chapters covering dojo.data, Dijit Form controls and Layout widgets. Theres a decent amount of coverage of the Grid widget, but given than it’s such a massive component, it would have been nice to have much more coverage – still, it would take four or five chapters to cover it completely, so it’s understandable.

It also has a nice description of Dojo’s Django Templating Language (dojox.dtl), which is a brilliant templating language that should get much more attention.

So, while this book wouldn’t suitable for someone looking purely for a reference guide (the official Dojo documentation is good for that, as well as the DojoCampus Explorer, dojocampus.org/explorer), after reading it from front to back you should have a pretty comprehensive overview of what Dojo is about, but if you are already familiar with Dojo it might not be as useful.

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This entry was posted on July 18, 2009 at 11:27 am and is filed under Ajax, Dojo.
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